Read Charisma Online

Authors: Jo Bannister

Charisma

The masts rose out of the shadows of Broad Wharf like the upperworks of a schooner, higher than the surrounding warehouses. The dock bustled with more activity than it had seen in fifty years: the throb of generators, the rumble of tractors, heavy boots splashing through a layer of greasy dirt, men's voices affronting the Sunday morning with orders and curses in a variety of gruff accents.
Like the skin of a great whale, grey and wrinkled with age, the canvas lay along the ground. Cables led from the baling rings to the mastheads and down to three small ancient tractors. Lighter ropes, still as much as a man could handle, led from the shoulders of the tent to a row of giant pegs driven into the wharf.
At a bellow from the ganger the men stood back. They knew the routine and also the risks: a snapping cable would whip back with enough force to disembowel a man. Snorting like plough-horses the tractors took the strain. By degrees the ropes tightened. The blocks creaked, the masts groaned; the great rings stirred against the timber. The canvas began to rise.
People all around paused to watch. People whose journeys had taken them near the canal stopped their cars; some took photographs.
Before the canvas was up and the cables secured men were waiting on the shoulder ropes. There wasn't much wind but the thing was as big as a tithe-barn: it caught whatever air was moving and bellied out, testing the strength and skill of its handlers. Men fought the weight of it to fasten the guys, then again to tighten them until all the free play that let it flap and beat like a bad-tempered seagull was controlled. Finally it looked like a tent.
A big tent.
Among those watching on the wharf were an old man walking a Jack Russell terrier and a young man on a motorbike. ‘Circus coming to town?' asked the old man.
‘Too right,' growled the young one.
The old man beamed. ‘I haven't been to the circus since I were—' He waved a hand not much higher than the dog's head to indicate extreme youth. ‘I wonder if they'll have performing bears. Do you think they'll have performing bears?'
‘They sure as hell have one,' grunted the young man sourly. He kicked his machine into deep throaty life, turned his back on the spectacle and rode off into the May morning.
It was only when the old man and the dog ambled over to ask the roustabouts if they really had a performing bear, and if they did cheap tickets for pensioners, that he found out it wasn't a circus at all but a gospel mission being conducted by the famous Welsh revivalist Rev Michael Davey.
 
Frank Shapiro sat at his desk, surrounded by paperwork, surrounded by cups containing half an inch of cold coffee each, listening to lugubrious bells chime from the smoke-black tower of St Jude's Waterside, knowing that most of his friends and colleagues were at home with their families: playing with their children, grooming their cats, looking for the missing wheel off their golf trolleys.
Yet a surprised observer would have recognized that curve of the lips between the strong nose and the double chin as a smile of pure contentment. Detective Chief Inspector Shapiro didn't mind spending Sunday morning in the office speeding the progress of burglars, muggers and street-corner cannabis dealers through the machinery of the law. He was counting his blessings. CID was about the only department of Castlemere police which hadn't been turned upside-down by the imminent arrival of God's right hand disguised as a Welshman in a white suit.
Uniform were laying plans for crowd control – Ha! thought Shapiro. In Castlemere? They really thought they were going to have to deal with throngs of Castlemere faithful fighting their way into a gospel mission? Traffic branch had little maps up on the wall showing how they could reroute different quantities of pilgrims at different times of day so as to avoid bringing the town to a standstill. Even the traffic wardens were in on the act, detailed to direct visitors to the designated car-parks; though Shapiro had heard, and had no difficulty believing, they had also ordered extra pads of tickets in happy anticipation.
But CID were not involved. He was aware that there would be incidents: if anything like a crowd assembled there would be
dippers to work it. Since the average turn-out for a religious meeting in Castlemere was four old ladies, two old men and Mavis Spurge who wanted to be a nun, Shapiro was disinclined to cancel all leave on the strength of it. He confidently expected the Michael Davey Gospel Crusade would be one of the great non-events of all time, was actively looking forward to seeing egg on the faces of colleagues who had no choice but to treat it as a major happening.
Because the hype preceding the arrival of the Big Top – if they called it that; perhaps they called it a Succoth, Shapiro thought with a malicious grin – could hardly have been greater if Rev Davey had organized the Second Coming for nine o‘clock on the first night and the Third Coming for nine o'clock the night after. For a month no billboard, no building-site hoarding, no gable-end in town had been safe from the posters. They showed a broad-shouldered, middle-aged man with a shock of white hair and expensive teeth, wearing a white suit. The backdrop was a city nightscape with the street-lights contrived to give him a halo. The first time he saw that poster Shapiro thought it crude, vulgar and sensationalist. If anything, he liked it less now.
So he sat alone in his upstairs office, savouring the eerie quiet of a town-centre Sunday, and thanked his lucky stars that all he had to deal with were thugs, thieves and the occasional murderer, and crusading preachers were somebody else's problem.
 
Disappointed, the man with the Jack Russell turned away from the great tent now straining its ropes on Broad Wharf and ambled along the towpath towards Cornmarket.
In the heyday of the canals narrowboats coming in from the north joined the Castlemere system east of town to avoid the congestion in Mere Basin. Traffic jams were nothing new here. Those who thought the occasional spats between pleasure-boaters and anglers lowered the tone of the place should have been around when bargees were cutting one another's ropes and nobbling one another's horses in the race for cargoes.
When the railway came the station was built on open land along the northern spur to facilitate the transfer of freight. It was then the most dynamic part of Castlemere, with frenetic trading in corn and other goods. But after the canals waned most trains went through Castlemere without stopping, and when the railways declined in their turn the big lorries by-passed the town altogether. Cornmarket that began as wasteland and reigned for a time as
the
de facto
heart of burgeoning industrial Castlemere returned quietly to neglect. In the 1960s a passenger halt was built nearer the town centre. Freight yards where old rolling-stock went to die and a cracked, abandoned wharf almost a mile long were all that remained of the glory days.
But every cloud has a silver lining. A derelict wharf is the ideal place to exercise a Jack Russell terrier: there's almost nothing still intact for them to damage. The man, whose name was Herbert Pendle, and the dog, whose name was Mary, walked beside the canal with the big old buildings of Castlemere shrinking slowly behind them and the empty space of Cornmarket opening ahead.
Herbert was brooding on the callous way he'd been misled. He'd been looking forward to seeing a performing bear. Herbert had no time for the modern notion that bears belong in mountain forests not circus rings. It was his experience that people like what they're familiar with and he saw no reason why bears should feel differently.
When Mary let out a low growl his first thought was that she was agreeing with him. If the proper place for bears was mountains, he pondered, what was the proper place for Jack Russells? Was there a chapter of Animal Liberationists meeting in a Castlemere cellar right now planning to set Mary free? Mary's idea of a walk on the wild side was coming in wet and finding her towel in the laundry.
But the little dog growled again, tugged at her lead and wouldn't walk on when Herbert did. She was on the edge of the towpath staring at the water, and her hackles were up.
 
Half an hour earlier the clatter of china from the hall would have drawn an urgent enquiry from Liz Graham. Now she only gritted her teeth and carried on decanting a tea-chest into the kitchen cupboards. She had passed beyond panic, beyond concern for earthly things like how much of her mother's dinner service lay in sherds on the parquet flooring. She'd chosen to move to Castlemere in the furtherance of her career, now she had to deal with the consequences. She winced. With a dustpan and brush, by the sound of it.
The thing that amazed her was how smoothly it had gone so far. She and Brian had talked for four days, then decided to do it. His enquiries about vacancies for art teachers in Castlemere met with three expressions of interest and, before the month was out, a firm offer. Their house sold quickly despite the recession, and while they were awaiting completion they found this place:
a nineteenth-century farmhouse with a two-acre paddock and a stable. The house needed some work but nothing they couldn't tackle themselves. Or rather, nothing Liz couldn't tackle. Brian Graham the art teacher underwent a crisis of confidence when faced with a brush more than an inch across.
Liz could pin-point the precise moment at which organized endeavour turned to chaos. It was when Donovan came to help. It was a kind thought, he meant well, but he wasn't very careful. He stacked the crates in teetering towers in the sitting-room and dropped the chandelier in the bath.
Telling herself it was all insured, even against cack-handed Irishmen, she wondered if it was because he wasn't used to houses. Vertical walls, high ceilings, floors that stayed still and enough space to swing an obliging cat probably confused him. Donovan lived on a narrowboat on the canal, he ducked going through doors.
The telephone rang. She couldn't remember where it was, tracked the sound to the dining-room, opened the door just in time to see Donovan answer it. Irritated, she stuck her hand out.
He shook his head. ‘It's for me.'
‘What?!'
‘Shapiro. I told him I'd be here.'
The voice growled at them out of the phone. ‘Detective Chief Inspector Shapiro, Sergeant Donovan. My apologies to Inspector Graham, but would you tell her I need you both back here – I've got a body in the canal.'

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